With Live Paint, you can freely paint your artwork. It is like painting a kid’s coloring book where you have the line art and you start filling them will different colors. In this lesson, you will see how to break a star into different segments using Live Paint.

Creating a Beveled Star using Live Paint

I will show you an example of using Live Paint to draw a beveled star. Let’s turn on Smart Guides to make snapping of points easier. Go View>Smart Guide to turn on Smart Guides.

Read the rest of this entry »

Liquify Tools can add some wacky distortion to your photos or shapes easily using different distortion effects. Though it is not popular but we will still take a look at how it works.

Liquify Tools

You can have some wacky distortion using the Liquify Tools. Here is the list of liquify tools.

Read the rest of this entry »

With 3D Live Effects you can add dimension to your 2D drawings easily. Though the features are limited, you can still control the appearance of 3D objects with lighting, shading, rotation, and more. You can also easily map artwork onto the 3d surfaces. Let’s see how each 3D effects works…

3D Extrude & Bevel

3D Extrude adds depth to an object to make it 3D. Select your object and go Effect>3D>Extrude & Bevel. The options window pops up. Change the Extrude Depth to determine the amount of depth. The Bevel sets the type of edges for the 3D object. Click and drag the cube to define how the star rotate in 3d space. You can also change the surface shading to define the texture.

Read the rest of this entry »

Using filters and live effects we can creates lots of special effects instantly. You can smooth out sharp corners, create warp text, add drop shadows and make textures with the live effects. There are many filters in Illustrator and you can have lots of creativity in experimenting all the filters.

Live Effects or Filters

To create special effects, we can use either use Live Effects of Filters. Most of the time I will be using live effects as I can continue making changes using the Appearance Palette. The choice is up to you.

Live Effects: When you apply live effects to objects you can still continue to modify the effects and objects. You will need to expand the object break it into paths again.

Filters: When you apply filters, you can’t make changes to the effect anymore. It is already expanded.

Read the rest of this entry »

Symbols help you to create repeated design elements easily. First, you will need to create a symbol which acts like a master copy. New instances you created are linked with the master copy. Once you update the master copy, the instances will automatically update the graphic but retain all the transformations made to the symbols.
Read the rest of this entry »